By Jesse Levin
One of the greatest threats to national security is the outdated social and economic compact between civil society and the US government.
For twenty years our national security apparatus was optimized for counterinsurgency in faraway places, with uncontested logistics and freedom of movement. While we focused there, our pacing threats focused on the information domain and on economic levers. They adapted and we did not. This is particularly true in the rising vulnerability of the resilience of our physical, economic, political, and social infrastructure to interdiction from adversarial powers, networks, and groups, effectively merging national and homeland security.
During those same twenty years a rift opened between the national security community and the public it serves. The Pentagon came to provide security and the citizenry came to consume it. That arrangement bred a collective dependence that now sits at the center of our exposure. We expect the national security apparatus to compensate for a radically different era while civil society keeps rewarding the practices that created our most pressing vulnerabilities.
We can not course correct if we do not examine how we got to where we are today. Much of the current predicament is economic, and it was built in plain sight.
For three decades the prevailing assumption was that economic interdependence would make great-power conflict obsolete. Commerce would civilize competition. Under that assumption, the management philosophy associated with Jack Welch and Milton Friedman made sense: offshore production, divest underperforming lines, move dirty processes abroad, and treat shareholder return as the paramount duty of private sector leadership. We celebrated it. Boards were rewarded for it, and so were the people who invested in those companies.
The result was the steady hollowing out of domestic production capacity and the concentration of critical inputs in the hands of competitors. No adversary maliciously forced this on us; we brought it upon ourselves one seemingly prudent business decision at a time.
Our efforts to remedy our strategic vulnerabilities will not hold without systemic sociocultural and socioeconomic shifts. Our national security predicaments rely just as much on new narratives as shoring up supply chains and production capacity.
The national security conversation has correctly turned to reshoring, munitions production, drones, and AI. That work is vital, and it deserves its resourcing. But it treats symptoms. If the incentives that drove production offshore remain intact, capacity rebuilt with public money will drift back to wherever margins are best the moment the subsidy ends or the headlines move on.
The conflicts we face today are fought with malign influence, economic coercion, and cyber incursion as much as with missiles. They target exactly the seams where private incentives and public resilience diverge. Deterrence through strength is still a Cold War concept in most minds: stockpiles, platforms, industrial base. In the gray zone, strength also means a society whose everyday economic choices don’t hand leverage to its competitors.
So resilience and readiness are contingent on behavioral change. We can’t keep listing national security vulnerabilities while still treating profit maximization as an unqualified virtue and defining fiduciary responsibility as if geopolitics didn’t exist.
We must redefine fiduciary responsibility as a national security imperative. As stakeholders in a shared sovereign enterprise, it is time to graduate from the soft boundaries of corporate social responsibility to National Resilience Governance where protecting systemic infrastructure, supply chains, and technology is recognized as core to enterprise survival and responsible corporate citizenship.
A fiduciary standard that ignores concentrated dependence on a strategic competitor doesn’t fit the environment we’re in. Single source exposure to an adversary controlled supplier is a material risk. Resilience costs money, and that cost is what we pay to keep operating when a supply chain breaks. Leaders who build slack, redundancy, and domestic capacity into their operations are doing their job well.
We’ve done this before. Within a decade, social and environmental considerations went from fringe concerns to board-level mandates, built into disclosure requirements, investor expectations, and how companies are valued. Whatever one thinks of those frameworks, they proved the machinery works. National security exposure belongs in that same machinery, as a disclosed risk and as a factor in how we judge returns.
This shift won’t come from the Pentagon. It has to come from boards, investors, business owners, and the consumers who reward them. The security implications are material, and so are the costs. Through the CHIPS Act, the Office of Strategic Capital, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Economic Defense Unit, and a growing number of industrial base programs, taxpayers are now financing the rebuilding of capabilities this country controlled a generation ago. We are paying a premium to buy back what we sold off, under far more dangerous conditions than when we sold it. That alone should be enough to change how we define a responsible return.
The strength of our nation rests with the populace but is negated without active engagement and ownership of responsibility. This has an economic as well as civic dimension.
This conversation rarely gets airtime because it challenges the prevailing constructs of national security, from the economics of procurement to the dynamics of civil-military cooperation. At the inaugural Narrative Strategies Symposium held in October of 2026, Christopher Holshek, a retired U.S. Army Civil Affairs colonel, made the case, as he has in his writing, that society’s capacity for service is a foundation of national readiness and resilience. The same holds for commerce.
The capabilities this moment demands rest with individual citizens and with the communities and businesses they run. This does not mean defense contractors or dual use firms built to serve the national security community. This requires the everyday citizen and business that make up the fabric of the country. Our greatest strategic advantage is the entrepreneurial capacity of the American people, and right now it is largely disconnected from our national security and policy mechanisms.
To view questioning these paradigms as partisan or as an indictment of the institutions that defend us is a mistake. Doing so is a patriotic obligation. If there is a culprit in this dynamic, it’s civil society, and that’s encouraging, because civil society is the one actor that can change itself.
Adaptation is a strength, as are humility and empathy. Nations that practice them tend to last. Until we examine our own choices honestly and adjust how we invest, run our businesses, and conduct ourselves, we will keep asking those who serve to cover a gap we created, and we will keep putting them in harm’s way to do it.